Outsourcing In Yorktown, Sort Of
-
- April
- 28
Yorktown is a Democratic bastion and Andy Spano’s home base. The rookie town supervisor, Don Peters, is a Democrat. The local Democratic chairman is Joe Apicella, a big cheese in the Louis Cappelli development empire.
And another Democratic big wheel in Yorktown is Marc Oxman, a longtime Spano friend and political ally.
Earlier this year, Peters wanted to dismantle the town’s legal department in favor of outsourcing the municipal legal work to a law firm. The idea he said, was to save money and obtain greater legal expertise.
One of the law firms interested in getting in on the business happened to be Oxman’s. Oxman had also donated $1,000 to Peters’s supervisor campaign, a significant amount of money for a local campaign.
I pointed out the Peters-Oxman connection in a column.
The issue was hotly debated on the town board for several weeks. Now, it appears that a compromise decision has been reached: The town will keep both a staff attorney to be paid $95,000 AND retain the services of an outside law firm. Only the firm isn’t Oxman’s firm. It’s another White Plains outfit.
Peters said he had no political motivations in revamping the legal department. But we were only trying to keep ‘em honest by shining a light on the relationships involved.
In any case, it looks like he did the right thing.
This entry was posted
on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 6:25 pm by Phil Reisman.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
| 
Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
The right thing? He’s paying them a 50 thousand dollar retainer, plus $240 per hour for legal work. For $240 per hour at a half-way decent law firm, you get a kid recently out of law school as your advocate. An in-house Yorktown attorney would work almost 2000 hours a year for 100 grand. That’s $50 per hour plus benefits. The same kid with a full Yorktown load at the private firm would cost you $480,000 plus the $50,000 retainer. Difference there of $430,000 less benefits. And you can bet the ranch dressing that soon, the price to Yorktown will be AT LEAST that.